3 Quarks Daily Advertising

Please Subscribe to 3QD

If you would like to make a one time donation in any amount, please do so by clicking the "Pay Now" button below. You may use any credit or debit card and do NOT need to join Paypal.

The editors of 3QD put in hundreds of hours of effort each month into finding the daily links and poem, putting out the Monday Magazine, administering the Quark Prizes, arranging the DAG-3QD Peace and Justice Symposia, and doing the massive amount of behind-the-scenes work which goes into running the site.

If you value what we do, please help us to pay our editors very modest salaries for their time and cover our other costs by subscribing above.

We are extremely grateful for the generous support of our loyal readers. Thank you!

3QD on Facebook

3QD on Twitter

3QD by RSS Feed

3QD by Daily Email

Recent Comments

Miscellany

Design and Photo Credits

The original site was designed by Mikko Hyppönen and deployed by Henrik Rydberg. It was later upgraded extensively by Dan Balis. The current layout was designed by S. Abbas Raza, building upon the earlier look, and coded by Dumky de Wilde.

Tuesday, December 18, 2012

In the People’s Liberation Army

Getting into the People’s Liberation Army was hard, but not as hard as getting into college. So, starting in 1973, I sent in my application and took a physical exam at the commune every year, and every year I was rejected. But then, in February 1976, with the help of some important people, my persistence paid off—I received my enlistment notice. Soon after that, on a cold, snowy day, I walked some fifteen miles to the county town. There I put on an army uniform and climbed into the back of a military truck for the trip to Huang County, where I moved into the famous “Ding Family Compound” barracks and began basic training. (I would not revisit the site until the fall of 1999, after Huang County had evolved into the city of Longkou and Ding Family Compound had been converted into a museum. What had originally impressed me as the magnificent home of a wealthy landlord I now saw was little more than a squat building, proof that my horizons had broadened.)

After getting through basic training, I was sent, along with three other recruits, to a so-called Intelligence Unit of the Ministry of Defense. People back home complimented me on my good luck of having been assigned to such a fine unit, but it actually turned out to be a major disappointment—it was only a radio-monitoring station that was about to be phased out.